Xenophon | Critical Essay by John Pentland Mahaffey

SOURCE: "Xenophon the Precursor of Hellenism," in The Progress of Hellenism in Alexander's Empire, The University of Chicago Press, 1905, pp. 1-27.

In the following excerpt, Mahaffey uses Xenophon as a "case study" in his discussion of the transition from "Hellendom" to Hellenism in ancient Greece; he finds Xenophon exemplary of the period in both style and content.

… [By] "Hellenism" I mean that so-called "silver age" of Greek art and literature, when they became cosmopolitan, and not parochial; and by "Hellenistic," not only what was Greek, but what desired and assumed to be Greek, from the highest and noblest imitation down to the poorest travesty. The pigeon English of the Solomon islander is as far removed from the prose of Ruskin or of Froude as is the rudest Hellenistic epitaph or letter from the music of Plato's diction, but both are clear evidence of...